Election 2012

It’s been two decades since a seat opened on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, and still the down-ballot race Tuesday has drawn comparatively little attention.

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been sparks in the contest to replace retiring Supervisor Pam Slater-Price for the North County seat.

The major candidates are congressional aide Steve Danon, Del Mar Mayor Carl Hilliard and Solana Beach Councilman Dave Roberts. Although the race is nonpartisan, Danon and Hilliard are Republicans and Roberts is a Democrat.

Stephen Pate and Bryan Ziegler are the two lesser-known challengers.

If nobody receives more than 50 percent of the vote on Tuesday, the top-two finishers advance to a runoff in November.

Steve Danon

Danon, 46, entered the race nearly three years ago, leading some analysts to speculate he drove Slater-Price into an early retirement, which she strongly denies. One of his earliest coups was hiring away Tom Shepard, among the most successful campaign strategists in San Diego.

The chief of staff to Republican Rep. Brian Bilbray, Danon has run a reform-minded, insurgent-style campaign despite having worked for supervisors Ron Roberts and Dianne Jacob. His priorities include facilitating job creation, cutting government spending and red tape and spearheading government reforms.

He wants to eliminate county pensions for all new nonpublic safety employees and abolish a $5 million annual grant program maligned as a “slush fund.” He wants to cut supervisors’ office budgets by 20 percent, abolish the $12,000 annual car allowances added to supervisors’ pensions and strike “per diems” for supervisors serving on outside boards.

Danon also wants to establish a regional ethics commission and impose a permanent gift ban for all supervisors. He has refuted repeated charges from Hilliard that he’s a “slick political bureaucrat” who campaigned full-time since July 2009 while being paid $168,411 per year to work from San Diego County.

Danon’s campaign said he’s never been a full-time candidate. The mayors of San Diego, Escondido, Encinitas, Solana Beach as well as former Gov. Pete Wilson, Father Joe Carroll and the deputy sheriffs association have endorsed him.

Carl Hilliard

Hilliard, 76, has committed more than $300,000 of his own money to the race. His campaign has largely centered on his profile: A naval officer, businessman, university professor and two-term Del Mar mayor. Hilliard, who grew his telecommunications company to 165 employees before selling a majority to Sprint, cast himself as a fiscally responsible consensus builder, though he opposes nixing the $5 million annual grant program.

He contends county leaders helped breed a culture of arrogance and promised to restore public service.

Hilliard proposed a plan to tackle the state’s public safety realignment that expanded county responsibility to manage criminal offenders. He supports cutting red tape in the planning and land use department.

To help spur job growth, he released a plan calling for additive, or 3D, manufacturing that would allow everyone — from individuals to small businesses to large corporations — to turn virtual models into physical ones by using computer-aided design or animation-modeling software.